Various architectures for executing services in data networks or in internetworked electronic units are known from the prior art. In particular, there are so-called service-oriented architectures in which a service may be called up via a request and the information provided by the service then output via a corresponding response. An example of services in service-oriented architectures are the web services known from the World Wide Web.
In contrast to this, data processing may also be carried out by services in a data-driven architecture, which is used, for example, in so-called embedded networks, whereby an input with a corresponding data input and an output with a corresponding data output are specified for a service, wherein a data input generates a corresponding data output. A number of services may thus be interconnected into a chain of services, wherein—with the aid of a suitable protocol—the corresponding data inputs and data outputs of the services and the forwarding of data between the services may be defined. These service chains may be easily modified without the services themselves needing to be adjusted. In this way a flexible and rapidly implementable adjustment of service chains may be achieved in a data-driven architecture.
Nowadays the various service architectures are used alongside one another and there is as yet no interface which converts the services of one architecture into corresponding services of the other architecture.